Louisiana Voice

By the time you read this, Kevin McCarthy may have pulled off some back room deals to swing enough votes to become the next Speaker of the House.

But on Tuesday, despite Louisiana’s five Repugnantcan congressmen voting for him, he failed in THREE SEPARATE VOTES to pull it off with 19 Repugs voting for other candidates the first two ballots and 20 the third time. Most of the opposing votes went to New York’s Hakeem Jeffries.

The deadlock could leave the door open for dark horse candidate Steve Scalise of Louisiana’s First Congressional District. Given the opportunity, Scalise would switch his vote in a nanosecond.

Folks in Rapides Parish might be unfamiliar with Jefferson Parish’s FODD (that’s Friend of David Duke) but it’s for certain that Scalise knows who Alexandria native Lamar White is.

You see, I could write all day about Scalise and his alliance with the white supremacy power structure in the Repugnantcan Party but why would I do that when Lamar White’s BLOCKBUSTER COVERAGE of KKKScalise created a national political firestorm and was of such superlative nature as to render anything else sadly redundant.

The thing that made his story even more unlikely was that at the time White was a third-year law student at SMU in Dallas, of all places.

That’s quite a distance from Metairie, but White dug out the story of how Scalise had once associated with Duke, a former KKK Grand Wizard, Nazi Party leader, and a Louisiana state representative from (hold on, don’t get ahead of me)…Metairie.

Scalise also found that Scalise was the guest speaker at a meeting of Duke’s outfit, the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), a decidedly white supremist group.

Outed by a law student in Texas, Scalise had little option but to ‘fess up and in doing so, told POLITICO that he “regretted” the speech. That, of course, was nothing but damage control (and don’t they all “regret” their actions once they are caught?).

Of course, like any good politician, he initially CLAIMED IGNORANCE about the identity of the group he was speaking to. But how in the world do you speak to an organization without knowing their identity. And naturally, as so often happens, that story didn’t hold water, as revealed by yet ANOTHER of White’s groundbreaking stories, and he had to come clean and apologize in the end. To paraphrase comic Ron White, don’t that beat freaking all! (yeah, I cleaned that up.)

But White wasn’t finished. In February 2016, he published a THIRD STORY detailing the chronology of his unearthing Scalise’s affiliation with Duke and EURO.

Even the ultra-conservative Breitbart Internet publication jumped into the fray, quoting New Orleans political reporter Stephanie Grace of what Breitbart said was the “liberal” New Orleans Advocate (The Advocate, both the Baton Rouge and New Orleans versions, are anything but liberal in their editorial content. In fact, the original Baton Rouge version was a moving force behind the creation of the ultra-conservative business lobby the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, or LABI, as it’s better known).

I digress. BREITBART in December 2014 quoted Grace as saying that Scalise once told her that he was “David Duke without the baggage.”

I (and, I’m pretty sure, Lamar White) beg to differ. Scalise has plenty of baggage.

And, because of Kevin McCarthy’s inability to secure enough votes, Scalise could conceivably become the next Speaker of the House as a compromise candidate.

Do we really need – or want – a David Duke protégée for Speaker-by-Default?